LONDON — “Don’t mention the war,” cried Basil Fawlty in the iconic comedy series Fawlty Towers. But in Britain, it’s too late. The start of commemorations for the centenary of the First World War has provoked ideological battles between the Left and the Right.

Patriotism, honour, historical truth and the place of humour in teaching history are all being fought over.

The spat has even pitted the Conservative-led government’s education minister against a comic actor — Tony Robinson, who played the dim-witted soldier Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth, a much-loved television sitcom.

In an article for the right-of-centre Daily Mail newspaper, Education Secretary Michael Gove said Blackadder and other satires had created a public impression of the four-year war — in which more than eight million troops and millions of civilians died — as “a misbegotten shambles — a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.”

In the final season, the character of Blackadder, played by comedian Rowan Atkinson, along with his servant Baldrick, are soldiers in the trenches of the First World War under the command of a clueless general, Stephen Fry, in what is depicted as a futile conflict.

“Millions have died, but our troops have advanced no further than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping,” Blackadder says.

But in his article, Mr. Gove cited the show as a contributor to “misrepresentations which reflect … an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.”

He said for Britain, the First World War was “plainly a ‘just’ war” and one country was to blame for starting it — Germany, with its “aggressively expansionist war aims and … scorn for the international order.”

Mr. Gove’s remarks were criticized by Mr. Robinson, a well-known activist for the opposition Labour Party.

“I think Mr. Gove has just made a very silly mistake,” Mr. Robinson told Sky News, in saying that Blackadder formed children’s views of the war.

He said teachers used the show simply as “another teaching tool” alongside visits to battlefields and reading war poetry.

Labour’s education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, accused Mr. Gove of a “crass” attempt to hijack “what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate.”

“Whether you agree or disagree, given the deaths of 15 million people during the war, attempting to position 1918 as a simplistic, nationalistic triumph seems equally foolhardy, not least because the very same tensions re-emerged to such deadly effect in 1939,” said Mr. Hunt in an article for the Observer newspaper.

Citing historian Christopher Clark, Mr. Hunt said, “other nations were just as imperialistic as the Germans and any attempt at a First World War blame game is futile.”

But Mr. Hunt’s article created more battlelines. London Mayor Boris Johnson accused him of “intellectual dishonesty” in a piece for The Daily Telegraph headlined, “Germany started the Great War, but the Left can’t bear to say so.”

‘If Tristram Hunt seriously denies that German militarism was at the root of the First World War, then he is not fit to do his job’

Mr. Johnson said Mr. Hunt mounted, “what appeared to be a kind of cock-eyed exculpation of the Kaiser and his generals. He pointed the finger, mystifyingly, at the Serbs. He blamed the Russians. He blamed the Turks for failing to keep the Ottoman empire together, and at one stage he suggested that we were too hard on the bellicose Junker class. He claimed that ‘modern scholarship’ now believes that we have ‘underplayed the internal opposition to the Kaiser’s ideas within the German establishment’ – as if that made things any better.

“Hunt is guilty of talking total twaddle.”

He added, “If Tristram Hunt seriously denies that German militarism was at the root of the First World War, then he is not fit to do his job, either in opposition or in government, and should resign.”

British historian Max Hastings, whose recent book Catastrophe recounts the opening months of the war, wrote of Mr. Hunt in the Daily Mail, “This was a sorry start to the commemoration. But it reflects the determination of Britain’s Left to make an ideological argument out of World War I, as it does out of almost everything else in history.”

In an email statement he added that Mr. Gove was right to claim that Germany was chiefly to blame. He said Britain “had no choice but to fight … because German hegemony on the continent would have been an intolerable outcome for freedom and democracy.”

But Cambridge University history professor Richard Evans disagreed, saying “it wasn’t that simple.”

He accused Mr. Gove and other conservative politicians of using the war’s anniversary for modern political ends, to advance “a kind of Euroskeptic agenda — the idea that bashing the Hun is a good thing to do.”